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Theology: The Cruxifixion by Fleming Rutledge. One of the questions you get most often, as both a pastor and a theologian, is: Why did Jesus have to die? I suspect the question keeps recurring because the assumptions behind the question are themselves never called into question. What people expect is a purely abstract, universally available, almost mathematical set of rules-about-reality from which to derive the conclusion, ergo, Jesus must die. We could spend a lot of time analyzing both the hypermodern retraction of Reason to one small domain of reality and the recurrent anti-Judaic, anti-Old Testament habits lodged deep in Christianity to account for this… but better to get right on to the cure. Rutledge’s astonishing tome is it. She walks you through every theory of the atonement and all the biblical motifs that feed into them, resulting in a rich mosaic of answers to this perennial question—an expansive rather than reductive approach. It is just what you need going into Lent. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Cookbook: The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. Speaking of Enlightenment oversimplifications of reality, it’s the gentle parody of just such an approach that makes me love this offbeat cookbook. Segnit wondered how it was that friends of hers could effortlessly assemble dishes of complementary flavors without a recipe: did they know something she didn’t, at least implicitly? That gave rise to a quest to find out what flavo(u)rs will combine to produce a sum greater than their parts. Segnit’s research is laid out in a wheel of ninety-nine flavors, arranged in taxonomies bearing charming names such as “bramble & hedge,” “brine & salt,” and “floral fruity.” The text, like a manual or encyclopedia, sets each flavo(u)r in apposition to most every other. Success is not just the obvious bacon-and-egg or tomato-and-basil, but also the surprising coffee-and-blackcurrant or grapefruit-and-avocado. Failure is chocolate-and-beet. But above all, what I love about this cookbook is the writing. Here’s an excerpt from Pork & Anise: “How long have you got? One hour? Stud a pork tenderloin with garlic, brush with olive oil, sprinkle over 1 tsp crushed fennel seeds and roast in the oven at 220°C for about 30 minutes, maybe with some sliced fennel bulb underneath the meat. Half an hour? Make a pasta sauce of delicious sweet Italian sausages. Five minutes? Unwrap the lacy, rose-pink slices of fennel-dotted finocchiona that you bought to lay on homemade pizza and fold them into different shapes as you eat them all, one by one.” I was sadder to finish this book than any of the novels I’d read in the previous year. Novel: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin is rightly a legend for her Earthsea chronicles in the fantasy genre and a number of groundbreaking sci fi works as well, among them The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. But she didn’t stop at those two already significantly different genres; her range was astonishing, including countless short stories, essays, and poems, a quasi-revolutionary Ruritanian romance, a fictional anthropology of a people that “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now,” and an idiosyncratic translation of the Tao Te Ching (which, weirdly enough, was an inspiration for my poetic paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount). Here I’d like to sing the praises of her least likely novel, Lavinia. It’s an imagining of the life and love of Aeneas’s eponymous wife, who never gets to speak for herself in Vergil’s epic. Le Guin’s evocation of ancient Rome is absorbing, as is her sympathy for a far-off people’s ideals, ethics, and emotions.
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